"A year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service was poised to use a scientifically flawed range map for the American burying beetle during a preliminary assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline's effect on the endangered insect."
"The beepocalypse is on the cover of TIME, but it looks like managed honeybees will still pull through. Wild bees—and wild species in general—won't be so lucky in a human-dominated planet."
"A viable, effective vaccine against malaria has long eluded scientists. Results from a preliminary study have ignited hope that a new type of vaccine could change that. The experimental vaccine offered strong protection against malaria when given at high doses, scientists Thursday in the journal Science."
The study was extremely small and short-term. And the candidate vaccine still has a long way to go before it could be used in the developing world.
"In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised to 535,000 its estimate of the number of American children with potentially dangerous levels of lead in their blood."
"The weather is one of those topics that is fairly easy for people to agree on. Climate, however, is something else. Most of the scientists who study the Earth say our climate is changing and humans are part of what's making that happen. But to a lot of nonscientists it's still murky. This week, two of the nation's most venerable scientific institutions tried to explain it better."
"MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare."
Research biologists are studying the elusive Cascades frog, which lives in alpine meltwater ponds in Washington's Olympic Mountains, to understand how warming climate might affect the ecosystems they depend on.
"California billionaire Thomas Steyer is taking his fight against climate change to Virginia, helping to buy TV ads criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli."
"Developers of the proposed Pebble mine don't deserve special protections for buying insider documents about the financial workings of project opponents and then using the records to pursue a case against those opponents with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, a California appeals court panel ruled [July 30]."
"The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to let oil companies continue to dump polluted wastewater on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. This includes chemicals that companies add to the wells during hydraulic fracturing, an engineering practice that makes wells produce more oil."
